UCSD to hire professors, focus resources

Key research areas of biology, design and energy will be the focus of the University of California San Diego over the next 10 to 15 years, its academic leaders have decided.

A key part of that focus is an aggressive faculty hiring plan, said Suresh Subramani, UCSD’s executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.

“The last couple years have been tough,” Subramani said, referring to the sharp reductions in state funding the university has endured. “Three years ago we were growing (the faculty). Then we stopped growing.”

From the 2005-06 academic year through 2008-09, UCSD averaged about 54 faculty hires a year. The university loses 30-35 professors a year to retirement and other reasons, Subramani said.

In 2009-10, UCSD hired only five faculty members because of the tight budget; in 2010-11 it was 32.

“I’m proposing in the next three years to hire 125 to 130 faculty, cumulatively, on the general campus,” said Subramani, the top academic official on campus.

The hires will be mostly targeted to match the three focus areas in the university’s strategic plan for the next 10-15 years.

They are:

• Quantitative systems biology, involving the physical and biological sciences and meant to transform diagnosis and therapeutics in medicine.

• Design, involving the arts and humanities, social sciences and engineering. The initiative is broadly defined to include the design of products, processes, institutional structures and services.

• Energy, focused on moving the country away from fossil fuels. It will focus on products such as electric vehicles as well as fuel cells, biofuels and photovoltaics.

“Making UCSD a center of excellence in these three areas will keep us on the map,” Subramani said. “Rather than retrenching, we are really investing in future directions to work on problems of societal impact.”

Subramani said the expanded hiring will be paid for with revenue from a general increase in tuition as well as money from the expanded enrollment of out-of-state and foreign students who pay higher tuition than in-state students.

The University of California raised tuition by 18 percent, to $12,192, for the current school year. In addition, the systemwide initiative to capture the increased tuition of out-of-state students is paying off particularly well for UCSD.

About 18 percent of this year’s freshman class at the La Jolla campus are nonresident students who pay about $35,000 annually That’s up from 9.3 percent from fall 2010. Only Berkeley, with about 30 percent, has a significantly higher percentage. UCLA has about the same percentage. The average in the freshman class across the system’s nine campuses is a little more than 12 percent, up from eight percent in 2010.

“These are dollars that could be spent somewhere else,” Subramani said. “But we have to make the investments today for the things that will be important 10 to 15 years from now with respect to excellence.”

He said the average faculty member at UCSD brings about $380,000 annually to the campus in federal and state research grants and contracts as well as private funding.

Subramani said the strategic plan was developed with David Brenner, vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine; Tony Haymet, vice chancellor for marine sciences and director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other deans. Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, who is stepping down at the end of the academic year, also has been involved.

“If you had unlimited resources, unlimited hires, you would go out and hire the best in all of the different fields,” said Mark Theimens, dean of physical sciences. “But we can’t. So we said, ‘Let’s be strategic.’ We are going out with a plan, looking at our faculty here, our strengths, and then building on that.”

Subramani rolled out the strategic plan at a symposium attended by about 200 faculty and others Thursday evening in connection with Friday’s Founder’s Day celebration, marking the university’s 51st year.

“I feel I can speak for all of the faculty when I say we view high quality research as absolutely essential,” said Joel Sobel, an economics professor and head of the Academic Senate at UCSD, who attended the symposium. “We absolutely support the administration in its effort to ensure we continue to do world-class research.”

Nonetheless, Sobel said, everyone connected with the university should be concerned about rising tuition.

“Decreased state funding is leading to increased student tuition and fees,” he said. “It’s a clear problem when access to the institution is being reduced.”